


Bloom

by CalamityK



Series: Growing Flowers From Your Chest [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Curtis/Shiro isnt end game, Flowers, Getting Together, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hanahaki Disease, Happy Ending, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Illnesses, M/M, No Longer An Ambiguous Ending, Poor Curtis, Sad, so relieved to be able to change these tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2019-11-27 02:45:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18188750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalamityK/pseuds/CalamityK
Summary: He holds a single dark orchid in one palm, wet and weeping from it’s petals. The taste of it at the back of his throat can only mean one thing.------------Or that fic where Shiro is married; Keith is doomed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ronniedae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronniedae/gifts).



> OKAYOKAY OKAY. SO let's get all this out of the way first off.
> 
> It's rated M for some description content, but nothing sexual. Also, see that _Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings_ PAY ATTENTION TO THAT. (though I can officially promise that no one dies.)
> 
> This fic is for Ronnie, who is the angst Queen if ever there was one. Love you ♥
> 
> And thanks to Jes for reading this over ♥
> 
> (Major props if you can find the John Green quote I slim-slammed into this.)  
> Edit: it's been pointed out that I accidentally put TWO John Green quotes in here, and though the echo of "Okay. Okay." WASNT on purpose, it is from the same book. xD

“To serpent's venom, has borne to the light

Orchids-

The Devil's blossoms”

 

― Hanns Heinz Ewers, Nachtmahr: Strange Tales

___________________________

The first flower falls from between Keith’s parted lips on the night of Shiro’s wedding. _He’s numb._ There are tears streaming down his face and he can’t tell if they’re from choking or actually crying.

 

 _Everything is okay_.

 

He’d been gone for… a while; busy taking missions and throwing himself into work with the Blades.

 

 _Everything is perfectly fine_.

 

He had received the invitation in the middle of a mission. A pre-recorded message forwarded to him, that filtered through his comm like static. Shiro’s voice familiar… but distant. The way it had been for a long while.

 

_Everything is alright._

 

Keith made it back to Earth a few weeks earlier than he’d planned. The hollow feeling that had grown inside his chest, quickly got pushed aside by warm greetings from his friends.

 

He didn’t avoid Shiro. He didn’t have to. Their schedules just never quite aligned.

 

_Everything is great._

 

Keith put on a white tux, and watched everyone else get dressed. He acted as usher when guests arrived. He took his place with everyone else. He watched.

 

He saw hands clasp in a familiar way, and heard words that hit a little too close to home fall from smiling lips. _No objections._ Then Shiro kissed a man Keith barely knows at the altar and the mysterious hollow feeling in Keith’s chest turned to pain.

 

_Everything is wrong._

 

Now Keith can’t seem to catch his breath, running alone through a stretch of familiar desert, and praying for the sand to swallow him whole.

 

He holds a single dark orchid in one palm, wet and weeping from it’s petals. The taste of it at the back of his throat can only mean one thing.

 

_‘I will always love you.’_

 

Words he’ll never speak ring around his mind, while more flowers sprout from his lungs.

 

_Shiro’s married._

 

Keith is doomed.

_________________________

 

Keith returns to the Blades six days early.

 

Kolivan doesn’t ask questions, he never has, and the new weight in Keith’s chest doesn’t slow him down. He takes more missions than is necessary, leaves for longer times on solos, and avoids thinking about Shiro. _Avoids thinking at all_.

 

It’s fine… for a while.

 

Long enough, at least, that by the time anyone notices that it’s not, his illness is hidden behind mission injuries. A weakened voice and bloody cough can easily be caused by a blade to the chest, even if the misstep that allows the injury is from something else entirely.

 

He recovers, but remains weak. Months without purging the flowers from below his ribs, finally seems to affect the way he breathes.

 

He coughs them all up one night, when he’s alone and the other Blades can’t hear him sob. Blood trickles down his bottom lip and he counts the blossoms, all of them coming out whole and one behind the other, until he loses focus after twenty.

 

He knows it will only grow worse from here, but he puts his armor on the next day anyway.

________________________

 

His own mother is the first to confront him. It’s the first time she ever has, and a thought weighs heavily in the back of Keith’s mind, that it may be the only time she gets to.

 

She catches Keith, after he falls to the training deck floor like he’s wilting, unable to mask his gasps, and too far gone to stop his hand from clutching at his chest. He manages to shut his mouth before he gags, blocking his purple-petaled tongue from view.

 

“Love, I think it’s time.” Krolia says, a hand on his back to steady him. There’s pain evident in her voice, and he can tell from her face how bad he must look. “ _Give up your blade_.”  

 

Keith’s eyes burn for real, but he just nods. Unable to speak around the orchid in his throat.

_________________________

 

Krolia sends him back to Earth, though it pains her to do so.

 

She escorts him there herself, after a long spanse of days and hard conversations. He tells her everything. There’s no secret that she’ll let him spare, not after years of lost time.

 

She handles the hard parts for him, or tries to, finally talking to Kolivan about why he must leave, and stretching the excuse of his injuries far beyond a lie. _It’s what mothers do,_ but Keith can’t stop wishing she didn’t have to _._

 

There’s never evidence on her face that she’s been crying, holding Keith’s hair back from his face as the disease wracks his body at night, and watching a child she just barely got back _wither_.

 

She makes him promise—while hugging him goodbye and sobbing against his cheek in the early dawn light of a random Tuesday— that he’ll comm her first if he ever needs someone.

 

“ _When_ you need someone.” She says.

 

His own inevitability settles then, like roots in his bones, as she leaves him to face his truth alone.

_________________________

 

Keith missed his friends, but back on Earth with them he finds he misses true camaraderie. The close knit bonds they once shared have unraveled into shadows, and he finds himself hiding among them. His secret weighs too heavily on his shoulders for him to feel comfortable in spaces he once considered home.

 

 _None of them notice_.

 

They edge around him, skirting the mention of his ‘injuries’ the way they used to skirt danger, and it's in their avoidance that he finds himself missing Allura too.

 

For all of their disconnect, she always had a way of seeing through him. He misses her gentle voice, and the underlying edge of ‘ _tell me_ ,’ of ‘ _let it out_ ’ that she would have if only she could still corner him. She wouldn’t ask why he’s given up his passion for battle before he’s even twenty-five, not directly, but she also wouldn’t accept his parceled lies as whole truths.

 

She would know that something is _wrong_.

 

He shakes her memory off like blackened dust and watches his friends with a heavy chest. The table they chat around, newly implemented weekly dinner between them, reads like an imitation of their old lives. A play-pretend that space no longer exists for a few minutes, whether in the sky or between their hearts.

 

Hunk still cooks a good meal, and Lance still has bad puns to make, though the former’s hands have scars and the latter hides a permanent frown behind smiling eyes. Pidge still stays busy, always busy, making this or that, sharing new plans for new plans, but the way her hair falls past her shoulders highlights her freedom from her past.

 

And _Shiro_ , stern and stoic Shiro, sits across from Keith like an echo, laughing with his husband— _Curtis_ —pressed along his side.

 

Keith doesn’t hate them, doesn’t have room for it past the piling-up petals in his lungs. But every story of their new lives puts pressure on his ribs and every moment in the same room obstructs the air in his throat.

 

 _Allura would have noticed that too_ , he thinks, and when he excuses himself earlier and earlier each week, he mourns her even more than he mourns himself.

 

_________________________

 

Tucked over a railing at the back of an observation deck, half unconscious and petals melting from his lips, he tells himself it was all inevitable.  He’s always out of breath these days, and his bedroom is always one step too far away. _Sooner or later, luck always runs out._

 

Pidge’s sharp gasp interrupts the vain hope that someone will find him only _after_ it’s too late, only peel his limp body away from it’s bled out garden _after_ he’s no longer aware and the flowers have stopped blooming.

Instead she peels him away from the railing with widening eyes and gasping cries, and he chokes on every second of it.

 

“ _Keith._ ” She whispers in a voice as shattered as he feels. _“My god, Keith._ ”

 

His only response is a strangled wretch as she lifts him the best that she can, her small frame shaking as the burden of his secret transfers to her with his weight. He shuffles where she guides him, blindly and panting, until he recognizes the opening to the medi-ward.

 

“ _No._ ” He finds enough strength to shake his head and croak, trying to shake her off in the same motion. “My room… _please_ … to my room.”

 

The gasps between his words fill in with her hesitation. There’s a suffering silent moment, long enough for her to weigh her own panic against the desperation in his plea, then she nods. The walk to his room is still too far, the stretch he couldn’t make on his own seeming worse while propped against someone else.

 

She doesn’t speak, not until she sits him on the bed. A myriad of emotions cross her features and suddenly she looks older, his mother’s anguish the only rival—the only comparable reaction—for the pain that seeps from behind her golden eyes.

 

“Why?” She asks eventually, sinking into the mattress beside him and placing a hand gently on his back. “ _Who_?”

 

He pushes hard on his own sternum, bowing to the pressure there and catching a breath before he replies.

 

“ _Isn’t it obvious?_ ” He knows, she knows, and the universe reminds them as he coughs again. He meets her eyes with desperate resolve. “Just… don’t tell anyone. This is _my_ secret to keep.”

 

There’s an overarching tension after that, flowing in and out of the air between them like vines that strangle weeds. Then he can feel her fingers clench on his shoulder blade.

 

“ _Okay_.” Her voice is flat, barely there, then louder. “Okay.”

 

If she figures it all out for herself in the silent hours after, Keith doesn’t know, because she never mentions it again.

 

_________________________

 

Keith read in a book once, that grief does not change you, it _reveals_ you, and his reveals him in the middle of someone else’s strife.  

 

“ _You don’t love me!_ ”

 

Curtis shouts it in Shiro’s face in front of everyone, tears streaming from his eyes, and bottom lip shuddering.

 

The way Keith’s fork clatters to the dinner table is lost to Curtis’s chair clattering to the ground and his fist rattling everyone’s plates where it connects with the table.

 

“Why would you say that?” Shiro stands, to match his husband, and attempts to place a hand on his shoulder.

 

Curtis swats it away like a passing fly, then there’s a stillness, a smooth stretch of calm before a storm. It gets interrupted only by the sharp intakes of choking.

 

Keith has to bite the tip of his tongue at the familiar sound, his jaw clenching and his chest roiling, but he’s not the one gagging.

 

 _Curtis is_ , a hand reaching for his own throat and his eyes bulging, air wheezing into his lungs like something acidic sits right at the top of them. They all see it behind his teeth before he spits it into his hand.

 

 _A lily_.

 

Paper-white petals lay clean and stark against the dark skin of Curtis’s fingers, and it’s an almost-blinding streak when he throws the flower directly into Shiro’s shocked face.

 

 _“You don’t love me.”_ He repeats. His now empty hand striking out in a breathless motion, pointed at Keith with a finality so hard it rattles the air. “You love _him_.”

 

Keith feels the words like a bayard to the sternum.

 

He can only stare at the lily tumbling down the front of Shiro’s shirt, weeks of them barely speaking, and memories Keith swears he’s forgotten, falling with it. The floral scent takes over his nostrils and coats the back of his tongue, then it changes, gets deeper and less like spring. It turns dark, coppery and _wet_.

 

Everyone’s eyes, all on him now, widen, and he realizes it's his turn to choke, much harder than Curtis had, strained breath and months of anguish rolling from his body all at once, pulling tears from his eyes and blood from his throat. He tries to stand, bracing himself against the quaking of his own body.

 

He feels it _stick_ , the orchid, and reaches for his open mouth pulling it’s dark body from between his swollen lips. It’s the largest yet, aged purple petals so different from the white lines of Curtis’s fresh lily, more damaged, and with mismatched patches stained red. It stands out like an omen, hovering in the cup of his hand.

 

“You… are _wrong_.” Keith croaks, his voice so weak it folds in on itself.  Then he crushes the mess in his palm, letting it drip and wilt under the press of his curled fist, and drops it to the table for everyone to gawk at. “He doesn’t love me either.”

 

As Keith turns to leave, he sees Shiro’s already stricken face turn pale.

 

_________________________

 

Keith's run through the desert ends early this time, sobs wracking his body and knees giving out before he’s halfway to his destination. He can do no more than lie there and breath what feels like his last breaths, as the warm wind blows tan granules of earth over him.

 

The sand will bury him by morning.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. So.  
> First of all, I need to apologize that this chapter took so long to bring you.
> 
> I hope some of you out there are still excited to read it.
> 
> Second of all, I decided to post part two as a CHAPTER and not an actual part two, because I felt it simply flowed better. It makes the end of 'part one' less jarring, and it feels more like a chapter than another one shot anyway.....
> 
> Third of all, there was a person very upset by Keith's pseudo death in chapter one, and I'm still sorry for that. I know you didn't think that me saying "Keith doesn't die" in my author notes was enough comfort or warning, and I'm very sorry it took me so long to actually put out the happy ending. I hope that if you read this you enjoy it. And that it no longer comes off as "unresolved tragedy porn."  
> It really took me some time to get over your comments enough to love this story again, but you made me pay closer attention to my tagging systems, and the perception of my audience when I write dark things and give vague endings, and I'm grateful for that. I need you to know that even though this fic is for Ronnie, THIS CHAPTER IS FOR YOU. And I mean that sincerely. I probably wouldn't have finished this if I hadn't felt that push to give it a happier, non-cliffhanger, ending.
> 
> Lastly, this is NOT BETA'D. All mistakes and shallow errors are my own. Though I hope Jes enjoys reading this finished as much as she enjoyed it in the works. ♥♥

From the black earth slowly there crept,

Orchids -

When the most beloved

Adorns pale features before the mirror

All 'round with Botticelli's adders,

There creep sideways from the copper vase,

Orchids-

Devil's blossoms which the ancient earth,

Wed by Lilith's curse

To serpent's venom, has borne to the light

Orchids-

The Devil's blossoms-

"The Diary Of An Orange Tree”

― Hanns Heinz Ewers, Nachtmahr: Strange Tales

\-----------------

 

_Everything is wrong._

 

Consciousness comes back to Keith like a fistful of mud hurtling toward a brick wall. It’s _sticky_ , forceful and sudden, as sweat coats his skin and his eyes blink in harsh light.

 

 _He's alive_.

 

If only by increments, and the familiar pain in his chest blooms. It spreads outward and lowers until he can feel it in the soles of his feet, but he can't even gasp, only shut his eyes back right and hiss for air.

 

“Keith!” The voice is sharp, and hands press out from nowhere, running their way along Keith's shoulders and holding him down when he tries to rise. “Shhh. I've got you. Stay still.”

 

 _Maybe he is dead_ , he thinks, the familiar tone of speech comforting him and setting him on edge all at once. He has to open his eyes just to see.

 

 _Shiro_.

 

The man he loves so desperately hovers over him, face a mask of horror, and Keith knows.

 

 _He’s alive_.

 

Though, he wishes he wasn’t. It’s too much, too soon, and the pain in his chest spreads faster than the blackness reclaiming his consciousness. As he falls back into it, he manages to get one word past his aching tongue:

 

“ _Why_?”

 

_________________________

 

The second time he opens his eyes is easier, the hard pressure in his chest slightly eased, and he coughs only once before taking in the world around him. His vision is a slow feed, familiar colors and textures barely forming the shack he once called home.

 

He’s alone in it. The shadows around him unmoving, and the dark emptiness of night pressing through the one window. The only twinge in his chest is _relief._

 

The glass of water sitting on his bedside table is the only hint that someone else had been here at all. The only hint that his foggy memory of waking up _before_ is something more than a fever dream.

 

He sits up enough to chug it, before closing his eyes once more and trying to _forget_.

_________________________

 

He wakes up a third time to the brightness of sun creating red behind his eyelids and an unbearable _heat_. His body burning hot enough to melt sand into glass, and he takes a few moments to fight the sheets clinging to his skin.

 

He only opens his eyes when he feels someone helping remove them.

 

“Shh.” Shiro says, gently. Seeing the way Keith must react to the sudden pain in his chest. “Don’t stir too much.”

 

But Keith is already stirred, too tired of not being able to catch his breath, too upset that he wasn’t left to his fate in the sand. Too worried that this will never end, even though the feeling of the blooms in his chest seems further away.

 

He struggles to sit up and find his voice, but he does. Though, It’s still only one word that comes out.

 

“ _Why?!_ ”

 

“ _Shh._ ” Shiro says again, moving to catch Keith before he can fall back to the mattress, holding him gently and moving pillows around to prop him up.

 

“I—” Keith tries but Shiro cuts him off.

 

“Don’t speak.” Shiro’s voice is so _soft_ . It makes Keith nauseous. “I’ll… _I’ll explain_ , but I’m afraid you’ll hurt yourself if you talk too much.”

 

Keith snaps his mouth shut at the raw concern in Shiro’s voice, jaw hinging with the snap of his teeth, and he _waits_ . Through several minutes of silence, several moments of his tense glare meeting Shiro’s sad stare, and what feels like an eternity of the ache in his chest growing colder, _he waits_.

 

Then Shiro finally moves, breaking eye contact and shuffling around warily looking for something Keith can’t see off to the side of the bed. When he finds it, his eyes meet Keith’s again, and the sadness changes slightly, moving into something almost hopeful as he sits an old book in Keith’s lap.

 

“I need to show you something.” Shiro says, and he smooths a hand gently over the cover before taking one of Keith’s and placing it against the worn spine.

 

Keith almost jerks away—wants to jerk away— but finally, he looks down at it.

 

It’s an old book. A leather bound copy of Ray Bradbury’s _S Is For Space_. The peeling-back cover, and faded gold lettering show its age and how much it was loved.

 

 _He knows this book_ , he’s known it as long as he’s known Shiro. It’s dusty pages having been read to him once or twice or _many, many_ times over.  The stories within having taken him to space, before he came to know what space was really like, before he went there for real.

 

Keith shudders, gripping the edge of the book so tight it groans as the pain in his chest reforms like a knife in his sternum.

 

“Open it.” Shiro says, placing a hand over Keith’s and easing the clench of his fingers. “ _Please._ ”

 

Keith hesitates, holding his breath as Shiro pulls away. Then slowly, fingers creeping around the edge like a vine, he opens the cover.

 

For a moment he’s not sure what it is in front of him—expecting to be met with the pristine beige of the first blank page. It almost takes too long for his brain to register the layer of red staring back up at him. Almost takes his eyes too long to trace the unfamiliar lines of petals.

 _A rose_.

 

Pressed, dried, and sitting firmly in the book, is a single crimson rose.

 

He stares it down, able to taste it behind his teeth just by looking at it, and he panics, fingers moving of their own accord and turning the page to move the flower from sight. _Then again_ . Page after page, until he sees that all of them, every single one, has a rose pressed against its words, fading, _bleeding_ , marring its contents all the way through to the back cover.

 

“What—”

 

He tries to speak his confusion, but Shiro takes the book from his grip suddenly, slamming it shut and sitting it gently on the floor in the same motion.

 

“Those are,” He takes a shaky breath, and Keith sees him truly falter for the first time, “those are _mine_.”

 

Keith’s world re-tilts on his axis, empty hand clenching around nothing.

 

“Who—”

 

“ _You._ ” Shiro says firmly, cutting him off before it can even form as a question. “ _You_ . And I… I coughed these up every day for almost a year.” He says it like it’s a weight he’s finally throwing off his chest by force. “ _Then_ I convinced myself you _did_ love me, just not the way I wanted. So they slowed down. _Then_ I convinced myself you _didn’t_ again. _Then_ I convinced myself to _move on_ . I convinced myself that trying to love someone else was _enough_ .” Shiro says like a finality, the _guilt_ evident in his tone, and he’s seems barely a breath away from crying. “But the weight in my chest never left me. The ache, the taste _, the memory_ … it always lingered at the back of my throat—on the very tip of my tongue—whenever I even _thought_ about you.”  
  
He pauses, and Keith reaches out for him on instinct, grabbing at his wrists and pulling him closer. Unable to comprehend if he’s hearing what he thinks he’s hearing. If Shiro is really saying—

 

“ _Shiro._ ” He croaks, and his voice feels more raw than it ever has from the abuse of hurling orchids, but finally, _finally_ , the pressure in his chest begins to ease. “ _Shiro, please._ ”

 

“I’m so sorry, Keith.” Shiro comes easily, clambering up onto the bed, and meshing himself to Keith’s side, pressing his face into Keith’s hair and inhaling there. “My blooms never went away, Keith. I just got better at pushing them back down. I got so good at _pretending_. When you…”

 

His voice breaks beside Keith’s ear and Keith has to look up at him, angling his head to where he’s face to face with Shiro, so close that their breath mingles when Shiro finally finds the strength to continue.

 

“The other night when you threw that flower onto the table, a part of me so severe, so vital, just _shattered_.” He brings a hand to Keith’s cheek, and runs a thumb gently across it, wiping away a tear Keith didn’t even know he’d shed. “I didn’t hesitate. I’ve made so many mistakes, caused so much hurt, and I should’ve been so _torn_. It should’ve been hard. I… _Keith, I got_ _married_ , I was so convinced I could cure myself, so convinced that I was _happy_. But when I was finally forced to look between all the decisions I’d been making… the people I’d been hiding from. I didn’t even _choose_. The second you ran out that door my decision was made for me. _I couldn’t let you die_ , not after…”

 

He chokes, and Keith brings a hand to the back of his neck to calm him.

 

“ _Stop_ .” Keith says gently, his turn to do the shushing. “Shiro, _stop_.”

 

He thinks about Curtis, their friends, the mess they’ve both left in their wake—and it dawns on him.

 

_They’ll have time._

 

Time to apologize. Time to explain. Time to make things _right_.

 

Keith isn’t dying, not anymore. He’ll recover from this. _They’ll recover from this_.

 

He mourns every second they’ve lost by keeping secrets harder than he’s mourned the secrets themselves, and he gathers Shiro’s face in his hands, forcing Shiro to look into his eyes.

 

“It’ll be okay.” He says on an easy breath, knowing it’s no longer a lie; no longer a reassurance he tells himself in the dark to keep himself breathing. “It’ll be alright.”

 

Then he presses his lips to Shiro’s chin. His cheeks. The very end of his nose. And—on the edge of an unobstructed inhale— _his_ _lips_.

 

All the air Keith lost to the blooms, comes rushing back, every beat his heart had strained to beat past the petals in his chest, flutters into overdrive, and the taste at the back of his tongue— retreats.

 

Keith loves Shiro.

 

Shiro loves Keith.

 

_Everything is going to be just fine._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I love comments and kudos, and just knowing that someone enjoyed my stories.
> 
> If you need to yell at me though, i'm @kingotabek on twitter...

**Author's Note:**

> Yikes. Leave it to me to unfix a fix-it fic...
> 
> Edit: I have changed the notes on this fic, as the old ones that included things like "cliffhanger ending" no longer apply AT ALL. lol.
> 
>  
> 
> that being said, comments are welcome, and people sometimes yell at me on twitter @Kingotabek. 
> 
> (Also this is my first Sheith fic (yay)!)


End file.
